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Intellectual Tradition
Intellectual Tradition (IT) is the central tradition of man qua man, it is the prisca sapientia, the essential stream of the sapiential lore. It has a thousand schools and branches that have branched off from it in the history of Man. Its disciples are known as teachers, educators, philosophers, counsellors, missionaries. It is often referred to as Philosophy, but it includes all the religions, and disciplines. In Modernity science is one of its most impressive branches. What is tradition if it is not rather intelligent? A transmission of superstition. Superstition is hardly Essential, and thus not of the Essential Tradition. The Essence has been likened to a flame, a light. A composer, incidentally a Gustav Mahler, who used music in such a radically different way than his predecessors, supposedly said: “Tradition is not to preserve the ashes but to pass on the Flame.” Others such as Benjamin Franklin or John XXIII have been known to evoke similar statements. Some even claim it was first expressed by Sir Thomas More. However, that is not central here because it is about the essence of this sentence. Marx said: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Can this be said to be intellectual tradition? It seems Mahler already answered that. No, quite the opposite. So here we see that tradition does not necessarily equate tradition. Etymologically the word means transmission. Tradition properly is the passing down of what is intellectual (intelligent intelligence). Otherwise it's just the transmission of superstition. Superstition is like a disease, it is transmitted, goes viral even. The word superstition literally means: that which is transmitted is beyond (super) that which can stand (Latin "stare" meaning stand). I.e. something that is not constructive. I.e. does not add to structural integrity. Something that is not fortifying. As Reverend Jesus said: "a foolish man ... built his house ... on the Sand", "a wise man ... built his house on the Rock". There are more traditions than can be counted, but a chief source has been called the Tao, or prisca sapientia — the prime wisdom, indeed — Logos. Lacan said: A psychoanalyst is not an explorer of an unknown continent, or of great depths; he is a linguist. What is intelligence? Simply, the word means to see difference. We would add meaningful difference. What's a meaningful difference? A difference that can augment life. So what destroys life is said to be erroneous — irrational — missing the mark — superstitious — sinful. See [[Nick Land|Nick Land]] & Teilhard de Chardin. Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including as one's capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity, and problem solving. It can be more generally described as the ability or inclination to perceive or deduce information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. Intelligence is most widely studied in humans, but has also been observed in non-human animals and in plants. Artificial intelligence is intelligence in machines. It is commonly implemented in computer systems using program software. Reverend Master Sir Matthew Sallwood said: Cassiodorus rebuilt Rome. He did it through education, because "the subtle rules the dense". The Left understands this, which is why Marcuse wanted a "long march (like Sherman to the sea) through the institutions". Along with clever men of resentment like Fanon, this was accomplished, and the Left took control of the "media" of the age, a mass media designed almost deliberately to facilitate a move to the "lowest common denominator" for the new men of the technical age. The logical obscenities which followed the Left subversion of entertainment, communications, and education will be lived through, personally, by all those privileged to be alive at this moment. Intellectual tradition involves reading. Interpretation. Catechism of the Neon Cathedral. There are already entities with vastly greater than human intelligence working on the problem of augmenting their own intelligence. A great many, in fact. We call them corporations. … Let’s focus on as a very particular example: The Intel Corporation. Intel is my favorite example because it uses the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of humans and probably millions of CPU cores to… design better CPUs! (And also to create better software for designing CPUs.) Those better CPUs will run the better software to make the better next generation of CPUs. — Ramez Naam The state of nature is ahistorical. Always and everywhere, humans form societies, organizing principles acquiring and preserving institutional memory and institutional knowledge: societal wisdom that may not be known or knowable by the people who make it up. Institutional intelligences. Nick Land sees capitalism as a thing, a thing of a certain type. What type is it? Another organizing principle, a superhuman (super- in the sense of ‘above’, with humans as its constituent parts) intelligence—that is, an institutional intelligence. Institutional intelligences compete both within and outside their type. Within: societies compete with other societies, corporations compete with other corporations, governments compete with other governments, media outlets compete with other media outlets, and one economic form competed with another economic form in the Cold War. Outside: governments compete with traditional cultures, organized crime, the Catholic Church, and so on, and capitalism competes with societies and families. (The Last Psychiatrist talks about capitalism’s weaponization of progressivism, but a particularly good example is feminism. I once had a professor explain that it was absolutely imperative for women to cease full-time motherhood and enter the workforce—and therefore outsource to some extent the function of child-raising to the state, the media, the economy in the form of hired help, and so on.) Institutional intelligences have goals, which run in a spectrum from strictly and totally cybernetically encoded in the most literal sense to depending on the individuals who are parts of the system. The victory of certain types of institutional intelligence with certain goals is usually seen as a problem: if capitalism totally wins then we all have no family and work twelve hours a day with Soylent instead of a lunch break and so on. Atomization is the result of a certain type of institutional intelligence being outcompeted by another type. The reality of atomization is indisputable: the loss of social ties, the decline of traditional cultures, women married to the state, children raised by the ruling structure, loss of imagined communities fostering commonality and promoting/easing interaction, loss of historically-continuous thedes to identify with and their replacement with subcultures and trends, and increasing multiculturalism—which studies like Robert Putnam’s demonstrate is a problem (for intuitively obvious reasons which I don’t have the vocabulary to express yet) and which is clearly supported by capitalism (deterritorialization, Koch-funded open borders promotion, etc.). If atomization is a problem, you want to fight it. How do you fight it? Summon up an institutional intelligence that can fight it. Thede-magic may prove useful here: see Benedict Anderson on the use of nationalism as fuel for revolutions. (I used to yell at Communists for their internationalism, but I later realized that they’re tapping thede-magic even though they don’t realize it—it’s a particularly weak form, though, consisting mostly of Streicherite crocodilism with little to no positive identity-content. This appeals to jackboot types, but most people seem to want thede-magic with positive content: hipsters adopting kitsch Americana and justifying it with a thin coating of irony, conservatives feeling the need to constantly remythologize American history, and so on.) nydwracu, August 16, 2014 Information Theology is a subset of Intellectual Tradition. Black Intellectual Tradition. Chinese Intellectual Tradition. Asian Intellectual Tradition. European Intellectual Tradition. Western Intellectual Tradition.